


I am no one you know

by folie_a_yeux



Category: Black Widow (Comics), Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Incredible Hulk (Comics), Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Child Abuse, Drinking & Talking, Drinking to Cope, Facing the mirrors and the monsters under the bed, Flashbacks, Gen, Memory Loss, Murder, Repressed Memories, You probably shouldn't teach Bruce self-defense when he's sloshed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-12
Updated: 2014-05-12
Packaged: 2018-01-24 04:15:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1591316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/folie_a_yeux/pseuds/folie_a_yeux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bruce doesn't understand why he let Natasha drag him to the bar. Why he watched as she poured out drinks and opened him up and dragged his demons into the light. </p><p>Until she starts talking about red cages and missed shots, about parents she can't remember and blood she'll never forget. Suddenly, he understands too well. </p><p>And the Other Guy does too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I am no one you know

Bruce Banner can’t sit still. He’s spent the past few hours perpetually off-balance, leaning forward on the edge of airport seats and tugged by the wave of post-jet lag nausea sweeping him back to the early hours of Nepal.

His clothes still hold crisp Mahabharat air under a pungent layer of sweat and cabin-service chicken. He thinks ruefully of the hours he and the Other Guy spent, in mediation and… well, the Other Thing, in the months following Loki’s attack.

Barely anything puncturing the calm humidity of the mountain range. Just him, as usual, scrounging at whatever therapy people like him can afford to explore.

Somehow, Bruce doubts this new therapy is one Nick Fury would have approved of.

“оболтус,” Natasha says, in a tone that manages to be both warm and distinctly insulting. “You think we came here to drink bad beer and take things slow?”

She brushes the sweating Miller bottle contemptuously to the side, leans over, and grabs two shot glasses and an entire bottle of Sibirskaya Strong from behind the bar. The bartender catches her, opens her mouth, then looks at Natasha and closes it again, tucking a strand of pink hair nervously behind her ear before turning her attention back to her orders.

“She’s going to sic the cops on us,” Bruce scolds half-heartedly. But he’s too tired to be annoyed, and still a bit too cowed to be upset. He knew the moment Natasha picked him up at the airport this morning and drove him to the hotel, knew when she rapped on his door an hour ago and told him to be in the lobby in five, that he would follow wherever she took him.

He’d known it in India, too, when she’d first approached him about Loki, and the situation with Barton. Sure, he’d tested her a bit — you could never be sure whether Fury’s people just wanted you to help put someone in a cage, whether that someone would turn out to be you. But the fear in her eyes hadn’t been of him. Just the fear that he’d say no. And that had been enough, so far, to keep him saying yes.

Natasha places the first shot in front of him, and he braces himself for the paint-thinner sting of the vodka he’s sure she prefers. He knocks it back in two swallows as she shrugs out of her leather jacket and slides onto a bar stool next to him. Grimaces. _Yep._

“Escaping yourself isn’t going to work anymore, Bruce,” she says, and drains the shot in one quick motion. “You need to get lost in yourself for awhile.”

“Maybe that’s healthy for other people.” He fidgets slightly, creasing new wrinkles into his already-rumpled plaid shirt. “They don’t have to be a cage keeping the monster under the bed.”

“Maybe that’s the problem.” She’s not good at hiding under playfulness, even if her sarcasm can match his word for word. The intensity in her dark green eyes gives her away, even she smiles. “You’re so busy caging a monster you won’t admit it’s a part of you.”

“So we’re going to uncage our monsters tonight?” He says, sharper than he means to. “Embrace the violence, let the horror out where everybody can see?”

She flinches. Barely noticeable, but he has enough of his blood up, always does, that the slightest tremor is enough to spike his heart rate. He can feel the Other Guy tense.

“Natasha,” he says softly, and leaves it there as a kind of peace offering. It’s the first time he’s called her by her name, first time he’s called her anything in fact, but he knows enough, can read enough, to know she’d hate to be called Nat, which is Clint’s name for her, or Widow, which is everyone else’s. Can feel, with what he dimly recognizes as camaraderie, that she must hate that the only identity people claim to know is one of the many she didn’t get to choose for herself.

Natasha scowls, so Bruce thinks he’s forgiven. She pours them two more shots, and leans back in her chair, her red hair swinging like a curtain over her pale, sharp-boned face.

“They know everything now,” she says suddenly. “All my covers. All my masks. I’m trying to decide how much I want my new face to be real. What that might look like.”

She focuses her attention on the faded clippings tacked to the bar wall, stubbornly avoiding Bruce’s eye. “So what we’re here to do, is to drink.”

 

**I hate my _past is the one thing I could never hold on to._**

 

Natalia Romanova can feel the smoke strangling her lungs, choking organs she doesn’t yet realize she has. She can hear the shrill, piteous wail of her own scream over the roar of the fire. As her tender eyes sting on air bursting into flame, as rough hands grasp her and yank her, as someone carries her swiftly through the thousand blinding whitenesses of the outdoors. But she knows, even as she whimpers “мама, мама,” as the burns crisp the fingers plunged into the snow, that her mother will not answer. That her parents are dead.

         

Her parents are traitors. Natasha Romanoff absorbs, calculates, does not respond. Listens calmly to Ivan Petrovich as he details the recovered cables, the late night transmissions, the thousand betrayals occurring right under her nose. Even as she studied at the Academy. Even as she had told them, tears in her eyes (and they had been crying too, but she had thought they were tears of pride, _of pride_ ) of her decision to serve her government as a scientist, to submit herself to the preliminary trials. She knows, as she allows her fingers to run over the fire-red pinpricks dotting her arms, the needle mark ravages of continuing government experiments, that she will be expected to treat them as though they never existed, and she tells herself she already has.

 

Her parents are late. It’s unusual for them on the evening before a performance, and Natalia Alianovna can feel the tension snap through her outstretched limbs, almost winces at the tightness in her hips as she launches into an adage. But the leg extends, it’s still clean, and she smiles as she stretches and practices an arabesque, leg brushed by the hand that reaches over her back as Grigory Yevseevich compliments her extension. She blushes to the roots of her fiery hair as the handsome instructor touches one light hand to her hip, adjusting its position with miniscule tapping guides. She’s trying not to think of the pain in her feet, of the toenail still splintering from last week’s performance, of the thousand tiny battle scars crisscrossing her dancer’s legs.

 

When she looks for them later, she will see no scars, no markers of the memories jostling and crashing through her head. No burn blisters, no cracked nails, no remnants of muscle rakes or needles or deadly fires.

It was the Red Room. It had only ever been the Red Room. And if she had parents she’s not sure they’re alive, and if she knows ballet she’s not sure how.

She ignores the constant trauma of setting and resetting, pretends she hasn’t noticed how the erasures no longer fully erase. She allows the constant tremor of uncertainty _who am I, who am I_ to turn to the constant assault of assignation _I am who, now I am who_

And then she’s not anyone.

 

 **_Do you_ ** **and I was _know what it’s like to be_ remade**

 

He thinks, if he scrubs hard enough, he can wipe it out.

There’s something under his skin, something only He can see. A disease, perhaps, some roiling virus curling and pulsing in his blood. Radioactivity spiking on some unknown channel, surging off him with unbearable heat. Scalding the mark on him.

Defective. Dirty. Unwanted. Disborn.

When His fist comes sailing at the side of Bruce’s head, ricocheting his skull against the linoleum floor, he can almost feel the unknown thing writhing.

Bruce learns to keep his head down and his shoulders tucked. Gentle curls swept over his forehead, glasses covering his light grey eyes. Letting his brain grow, his eyes absorb, as his body thins and shrinks. Smile somewhere between a grin and grimace, posture bent to be, not defensive exactly, more the crouch of a fox in a trap that’s ready to gnaw its leg off. If it came to that. If it meant getting away.

The other students think he’s removed, aloof. They move away from him, honing on that sharp selfish childinstinct of _different, off_. He’s grateful. It saves him having to put another wall up. Gives him time to get lost in the beauty of a virus, to find the rhythm in an unraveled sequence of trailing DNA. To appreciate a world too brutal up close for what it can offer at a distance.

He can’t remember his mother’s face anymore. Just the sticky slick oilsheen of blood on his hands, the shrieking wail of ambulance sirens, and the determination to

_It was born in the dark. Crouching there. Pushing. Expanding. Bursting to get out. Break free. To be allowed to be monstrous. To seize everything that comes with it. Outsize and uncontainable and not accepting, not constructing, not containing. Breaking._

Shut it down. Shut it in. Shut it out.

 

 **_We're a chemical mixture that_ ** **make me one of your own.**

 

“You didn’t.”

“I did! Honest.” Natasha raises her hand as though she’s about to swear on a Bible. “Knocked him completely on his ass. Happy didn’t know what hit him.”

“Although,” she continues, grinning, “neither does Stark, half the time. Did Clint tell you about the time we reprogramed JARVIS to fill the suit with donuts for a whole week, every time he tried to add a new part?”

Bruce runs a calloused hand through his soft brown curls and slumps back into their newly acquired booth. Natasha’s happy to see a smile creasing the lines of his face, eyes bright behind his glasses, behind the grey-streaked hair flopping against his forehead. It’s one of the rare smiles he gives when he’s laughing at the world, instead of cringing away from it. “I can’t believe he didn’t try to get you two back.”

“Oh, he did,” Natasha says, gravely. “But he’s hopeless at pranks. Just, radiating tells. Stark couldn’t keep a secret if his life depended on it.” She tilts her head, red hair swinging around her shoulders, and looks him over appraisingly, eyes narrowing. “But you can, can’t you?”

“Oh no,” Bruce counters. “You’re not recruiting me again. I still don’t think Thor’s forgiven me for punching him through that window.”

“Well, it’s not as though you were the one doing it, right?”

Natasha doesn’t think she’s ever been less tactful in her life.

She could read the charge in the room, could pick up the twitch in his hand, but all she has to do is look at his eyes. At the way Bruce has gone from gazing around the bar to now, suddenly, locked on her face in a way that makes her throat catch on her next breath.

“Bruce,” she says, and tries to adopt the kind of tone Steve would use, soothing, something that sounds earnest and warm. It comes out in a bark, like one of her old drillmasters. She winces and shifts closer to him, knocking one knee of her dark jeans against his rumpled khakis.

“Bruce. I'm sorry.” That’s better. It’s the sort of voice she would use to lure a child from the corner — _had used to lure one,_ she thinks, as another jagged memory slices her consciousness _if that memory is true_ — but if patronizing is as close as she can get to warmth, she’ll have to work with what she has.

“I don’t know what it’s like, to be taken over like that. All I’ve ever known is control. Or what I thought that meant.” She jerks her head sharply at the waitress coming to get their next order, and she scurries away, probably to compare notes with the bartender. “But even with that thing roaring out of you, tearing it apart, at least you know it. You know it’s there. You know it’s something real. I’m still trying to find out what real means.”

She takes a chances and slouches forward, nearly touching her forehead against his, and she can see him scan her quickly to make sure she’s not too drunk, to see if she’s about to attack, to read if she’s afraid. A mirror of the same scans she’s done a hundred times, defense in the offensive. Shielding by deflecting. Hiding by unmasking.

Natasha wonders if she should be scared. She isn’t sure if reckless is a mode she’s ever attempted. Isn't sure if reckless isn’t too kind a word for what she’s playing now.

“You didn’t choose for this part of you to become the Hulk, any more than I chose… to be what I was. But maybe you can still decide what being the Hulk _means._ ”

She feels his muscles clench, then relax.

And it’s in that moment, through a growing haze of premium vodka and midrange beer and sinkbase gin, that she sees it. It’s not a flash of green, no growth in the pupils or clenching of the hands, none of the old tricks she would have read through years of training to evaluate and dissect in the instant it takes to fire a gun or empty a syringe.

But she knows what she feels, if that counts for anything, and lately it seems that’s the only thing she trusts herself to rely on. That Bruce isn’t the only one listening to her. Never has been.

And she understands more about Bruce’s monster, maybe than even he does. She understands not being trusted, even more than how hard it is to be able to trust.

She understands the fear of being in a cage.

 

 **_Is this what_ ** **I am now… And you’ll never know who _I was before?_**

****

She sees the symbols, but everything looks less trustworthy, more volatile in English. Not the blocked Cyrillic of the signs or the tricky cursive of day-to-day writing. Just Ws and Vs and odd silences and sharp sounds firing at the roof of her mouth. She supposes she takes to French faster because it’s honest about its treachery. Never expecting to hear the whole word or put anything before beauty, even as the rigidity of its logic contains that essential slipperiness.

She’s used to speaking in code, to reading the text below the words, but the multiplicity of meaning in English, the exasperating way words mutate themselves from insults to compliments and hide gender, plurality, identity, has never left her.

She doesn’t know how many times she’s been set and reset, whether she was old enough to have memories or young enough to have a soul before both were wrenched from her, before she found the mooring to wrench herself back.

There’s nothing steadier than quicksand before the stand-off, before she had a gun leveled at Clint and he had an arrow nocked for her. Before something flickered in her eyes, maybe, or maybe in his, and she relaxed her grip, just enough, and the arrow missed her, or didn't miss, and sent the gun spinning into the dark.

Everything she remembered afterwards she hoarded, greedily, reciting them to herself each night like a deathlist or a prayer. Burning them into the files in her mind, tearing up the past by whatever roots she can grab and writing over a ledger that continues to bleed.

She repeats what Clint’s told her a million times: That she was following orders. That she was raised to be something that follows those orders without questioning, and is replaced by another self when it doesn’t. That the blood in her ledger drips from other hands. That one day the work in SHIELD might wipe that ledger clean.

Then Loki took Clint into his mind. Then all SHIELD came crashing down, and Hydra rose, revealed, in its place.

Broken, their union of willful remaking and the determination to never be unmade. So raw, so unmoored, to see what happened to her repeated in him. To watch it from outside herself, to not be able to hide it behind the doors she constructed in her mind. And then to learn that the people she killed, the lives she protected, the missions she carried out, weren’t wiping the ledger clean at all. That she’d never been in control. Just a puppet. A weapon. A tool.

She’s not sure if she’s more terrified of the permanency of what she’s done, or the fact that she can never be sure _what_ she’s done. That every memory is a trap or a plant or an erasure as much as it is a scar.

As they lie in a stranger’s bed one night, panting from the exertion of a new union of forgetting, Clint asks her about one of the marks on her back. Asks her who she wants to be, now that she finally has the chance to be anyone.

But she’s been a dozen people in any moment. Hands always grasping at branches, reaching for masks, so much that if there is such a thing as a soul, in her it’s probably fire, shifting and changing and burning everything old in its path.

“My past is my own,” she tells Clint instead, and still isn’t sure who she’s lying for.

 

**You will walk away, and never _had a chance to say no._**

 

_You think I don’t know what Fury wants?_

He wants to scream at her. He wants to go back to his patients, and focus on the obsessive, miniscule monsters writhing in their skin. He wants to remember how to cry.

_It will happen, it always happens. The one part of me I can’t control or understand, and the only thing anyone bothers to know. The Beast. The Monster. The Hulk._

“I tried, alright? The Other Guy spit it out.”

Bruce has never felt braver than when he’s running away. It’s difficult to explain to people without his… condition. How hard it was to admit that his biggest mistake was to keep it pinned in, and that his greatest cowardice was believing he’d had control in the first place.

He isn’t even sure if he considers the Other Guy a part of himself or not. It helps to place him to the side like that, to label him openly as something separate and apart. But then he changes, and Bruce still knows. He still thinks. He still remembers.

Flashes, at first. A great heat, and an agonizing pain, and an entire world dipped in the narrow lens and drenched in the flushing distortion of rage. Barely what he could call a memory, much less any sense of control.

But then New york had happened. And when he’d seen Stark falling, when he’d realized what Stark had done — and Bruce was the one who realized it, he knows this — then both of them, he and the Other Guy, they had both thought: _No._ And had dived. And had caught.

And in that moment, he didn’t feel lost, or immersed, or divided. He felt clarity. He felt whole.

But the thing is: people tell you things. Lie to you about who you are and what you’ve done. Do it for so long that an assurance is as good as a betrayal. A promise as bald as any lie, a pledge nothing but another transparent falsehood.

Words like. Safety measures. Defensive maneuvers. Certain precautions.

He will never be sure whose memory has been stripped away too, by governments or traumas or the Others roiling under their skins. What’s filled in and gouged out and remade before you got the chance to unmake your mistakes yourself.

So he doesn’t think he’ll tell Fury, when the Director finally decides to admit he’s alive. When he eventually reaches out. Better Fury doesn’t know about this growing connection to the Other Guy. This mutual awareness, this extremely grudging respect.

Better, in some ways, to remain unpredictable. To hold on to the power in being a loose cannon, in seeming uncontrollable when you finally get a taste of control.

**You’re _never going to_ dig it out of you. _Stop_ digging. Start _leveling._**

 

“C’mon,” Bruce urges, shoving his glasses back up as they slide, dangerously slippery, back to the end of his nose. “I promise you, it’s… liberating.”

“It’s a child’s game.”

“What, and prank wars are just really low-key Soviet missions? Look.” He runs his tongue over his lips. This will probably be the worst hangover he’s ever had. He finds he doesn’t care. “Just because you published all that dirt online, you expect me to believe you don’t have any more secrets? Here, I’ll go first.”

He sinks back into the vinyl of the booth, closes his eyes, and feels a dreamy smile flood across his reddening face. “I got into science… because I believed in magic.”

He can feel the booth shift as Natasha stirs. Hears a snort. “What, like witches and golems?”

“Not exactly. More… I mean, science was magic, before people gave it another name. And I used to have, these great pulp mysteries I’d swipe from the school library. _Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea_ … and in all of them, I mean, the doctors just completely screw up, overpass human boundaries, laws of god and man, all that.”

He opens his eyes. “But I could never stop thinking about the monsters. The awakening things, the creations. They never seemed that bad, you know? And this, I mean, this is the hubris of this four-eyed kid in the middle of nowhere, but here I am, supposed to be learning about what _not_ to do, and all I can think is: I would do it differently. I could really make something good.”

It’s as though Bruce has finally broken through a haze of drink, and emerged on the other side of liver poisoning completely unscathed. He’s more animated than he’s felt in months, and somehow calmer, too. There’s no panic racing on the timbre of his voice, no adrenaline pricking at his nerves. He hasn’t felt this warm since the thunderclapped night he made cocoa with his mother, in yet another memory he hasn’t remembered to forget.

“And of course, I ended up doing the same thing. I made a monster. But, you know,” he hears himself say suddenly, “he did save me, and more than once. So I guess I’m going to have to believe in magic after all. Even if it’s the worse kind.”

“I already told you.” Natasha murmurs, turning her empty bottle slowly in her hands. “We could always use a little worse.”

There’s a short, embarrassed silence.

“You know,” Bruce ventures, running a hand through increasingly flyaway curls, “I was kidding before. You don’t have to — ”

“I don’t know how old I am,” Natasha blurts. Her face goes bright red, and her empty bottle loses the cylindrical equilibrium of her palms and goes flying. It clinks, hard, against the growing collection on the edge of their table. “Not just what day I was born, I mean. I’m not sure how long I’ve been alive.”

She takes a deep, shuddering breath. “Facts are only codes in a file. Files can be faked, codes broken, memories replaced. But I do know I have some of the Cap's serum in me, or some bastardized version of it. And based on some research I started back… back when Clint first brought me to SHIELD, some version of me has been kicking around since at least 1964.”

She darts a look at Bruce, and he can tell she's waiting for him to doubt her, to fear her, to move suddenly away. He looks at the jut of her chin, the sudden defiance in her eyes. Recognizes the fear that hides under it. He tells himself to think of what Steve would do, to be sympathetic and patient and calm.

Bruce can’t help it. He bursts out laughing.

"Damn, Natasha. Just... you’re looking pretty good for an old lady.”

And for the first time all night, Natasha relaxes. Lets the warmth of the alcohol pour over her. Gives him a wide, open smile.

“You’re pretty spry for a rage monster, yourself.”

 

**_Maybe we can start with who we weren’t. Maybe we can strip that away, and then we can figure out what to build up again. If we have to._ **

**Are you ready for the world to see you as you really are? Well, now would be the time to find out.**

 

Clint really doesn’t have time for this.

He drags a completely wasted Bruce and a heavily incapacitated Nat out of the booth, hoists them one to each shoulder, and heaves them in the direction of the car. Happy Nat is aware enough not to be dead weight. Even happier that Bruce is light enough, in this form at least, to just plain carry.

He tries not to laugh. This is one of the rare times, deliciously rare, that Natasha has done something completely without thinking, the type of brave, stupid, out-there move she usually leaves to him. The kind she's been doing more and more since she jumped on that alien cruiser in New York.

He allows himself the luxury of rolling his eyes as he stores Bruce in the backseat, tucks Nat into the passenger side.

"Clint. You. don't. understand." Natasha refuses to slur her words when she's tipsy, either from pride or some mistaken conviction that she can hide just how drunk she is. She settles for emphasizing every word, as though she were pounding the knowledge, the surety that she is _definitely sober_ , into Clint's head. The laughter is becoming harder to tame now."We have. a connection now. Bruce, show —" she swallows hard, gestures emphatically mid-air. "Show Clint what I taught you."

From the backseat, Bruce moans and gives a small, extremely sloshy wobble.

"You see?" She beams with pride. "That's the first move I learned of са́мбо." She leans toward Clint as he buckles her in, sending a potent whiff of alcohol his way. " **САМ** озащита **Б** ез **О** ружия, remember? _Your strongest weapon is yourself."_

"Got it," he says. Mainly to stop her squirming as he snaps her in, to calm her as he shifts Bruce into a seatbelt, gets behind the wheel, and drives back to the hotel. Mainly because he finds every smile Nat gives, every moment of carefree exuberance, as intoxicating as she does.

But the thing is, he does understand. Now more than ever.  
  
Looks like he's been a bad influence on Nat, after all. _Or maybe,_ he thinks, glancing in the rearview mirror at the bemused expression on Bruce's face, _she's been a bad influence on us both._  
 


End file.
